Question for the FT guys

[ywg256]

Guys,

I've posted a tpoic on the LM forums but thought I would check in with you guys since you are far more reliable and may know the solution to my issue. I experience awful performance no matter what airport - default or payware, AI or no ai but on approach only once the airport pops up into view. To be fair this isn't just FT but ALL add ons. What is strange is that I could be maxed out with full ai on ground at most airports other than say EGLL and KJFK with smooth 30fps. For instance on approach, I will get massive stutters at between around 12-20 fps but once landed it will go back to a solid 30fps and smooth. Starting up a flight is no problem either even at CYYZ. I have tried all sorts of settings and can't shake the crap performance on approach. Mysystem is:

i7700K o/ced to around 4.5
1080ti black edition 12gig
32g ram

my settings frankly are very modest within the sim with most in the mid range. I currently have AI scaled back to 70 AI aircraft max with zero road traffic and most of my orbx vector settings are off.

any ideas?

Thx,
Sean

[martin[flytampa]]

I have no idea but if it stutters on approach only perhaps the aircraft is doing something? You tried it with different payware and stock aircraft as well?

[george[flytampa]]

I've always thought it was an accumulated effect of many things. Complex Aircraft, scenery, weather, AI etc. Plus when you are moving at speed the gfx engine is constantly tesselating & untessellating the terrain, loading and unloading mips. I never felt the terrain was optimized as well as it could be. If you have all those Orbx regions it can add a little more work.

There is a nice tip for preventing textures loading & unloading. It might prevent a few stutters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vFgfBSSXeE

[ywg256]

Just reporting back on this one. I haven't loaded flight sim for the longest time in years I've been so frustrated. I tried Rob Ainscough's video you linked and didn't help unfortunately with my issue which is on the ground at any airport including cyyz and full ai OR zero ai I am at 30fps (fps is locked to my 30hz refresh). After take off I circle back to cyyz or most airports frankly and frames drop into the teens - again I have tried zero ai or full, zero road traffic, medium scenery object settings except for complexity which is dense. Most shadows are off and dynamic lighting on or off doesn't seem to matter either. not sure where to go from here...honestly thinking about either giving up on flight sim altogether or going back to fs9...lol.

[F737NG]

my settings frankly are very modest within the sim with most in the mid range. I currently have AI scaled back to 70 AI aircraft max with zero road traffic and most of my orbx vector settings are off.

any ideas?

Toronto is like London on ESP sims, always been a struggle to maintain high FPS.

Unfortunately, there are many possible reasons for your poor performance.
Some easily rectified issues could relate to:

In the nVidia Control Panel program, 'Manage 3D settings', 'Program settings' tab. Select Prepar3D from the drop down list and scroll down the 'Specify the settings' until you reach 'Power management mode'. Is 'Prefer maximum performance' selected?

Are unnecessary programs shut down from running in the background and have you turned HT off? Have you thought about using an affinity mask to move P3D to run off certain cores only?

Do you have 'Dynamic 3D Autogen Vegetation' checkbox unticked on the settings page.

Have you moved your sliders all the way to the left and incrementally moved them to increased detail one-by-one to see what your setup can handle including all types of AI?

You should be ok with a 1080ti, but have you limited Anti-Aliasing to 8x MSAA? SSAA puts a heavy demand on resources.

If you have FSUIPC installed, have you turned off the autosave feature?

Do you have disk imaging software installed and running? IIRC, Acronis True Image was the culprit of a number of simmers suffering from low FPS.

Have you deleted your prepar3d.cfg and your shaders folder (NOT the ShadersHLSL folder in your root P3D) and allowed the sim to rebuild them by running a new instance of Prepar3D?

Right click on the Prepar3D.exe icon. On 'compatibility' tab, is 'Disable fullscreen optimizations' ticked?

What's your native screen frequency? Is it easily divisible to give 30 FPS? My monitors run at 60Hz so dividing by 2 gives me 30 FPS target using the program RivaTuner Statistics Server. 144 Hz might be better using 24 FPS, 75 Hz better using 25 FPS.
Even though it's not a true fullscreen program, you can trick P3D into acting like one and use Adaptive, Adaptive (half refresh rate) or Fast V-Sync in nVidia Control Panel.

There are more general forums available as well as Reddit/r/flightsim to troubleshoot in more depth.
Good luck!

[PatrickZz]

It could also have to do with the speed of the harddisk or SSD that you have your sim installed on. While on approach, all objects at the airport need to be loaded into memory at once and if they can't be loaded fast enough that might cause some stutters. If you're already at the airport, that means they're already in the memory of the computer and don't need to be loaded anymore.

Always make sure you have your sim and all add-ons installed on an SSD, never on a HDD. SSDs are much faster, meaning that your sim can load objects from the disk into the memory faster than it can with a HDD. HDDs are often the bottleneck, slowing down even the fastest computers as data isn't available quick enough. A HDD can't load it that fast, but an SSD can.

[ywg256]

Hi Guys

Appreciate this input. I have tried all of those suggestions above except fsuipc autosave. Will have to check on that when i get back home in the next couple of days. I have dynamic veg off and all of my hard drives are solid state. I have three. One has the sim and some scenery there is another that has a bunch of payware addons as well. I have deleted shaders multiple times and have tried varying levels of ai and most times poor results. Its frustrating because i have enjoyed this hobby since 1997 and lately i have been doing nothing but staying away out of frustration of not being able to really use the sim. Will try some more things when i get back home and see what happens.

well tried another flight cyow to ft cyyz..dropped my ai down to 120 a/c and settings about halfway for everything....between 14fps and 8 fps on approach but once I land back up to smooth 30 fps...frustrating..think I am going to give up on flightsim until microsoft fs2020 comes out....enough of this crapola....not enjoyable anymore and tired of spending thousands of dollars to put up with this.

[PatrickZz]

What you could try as an experiment is to start at a certain airport, take off and while airborne immediately turn around. Then approach and land at that same airport. Make sure you don't get too far away from the airport, stay near!

Because all of the objects and textures of that airport are already in the memory (they've been loaded when you loaded the sim), they don't need to be loaded on approach anymore. This means you shouldn't have any stutters. However if you get too far away from the airport, they're being unloaded and need to be loaded again when you approach it.

[F737NG]

Hi Guys

Appreciate this input. I have tried all of those suggestions above except fsuipc autosave.
[...]
well tried another flight cyow to ft cyyz..dropped my ai down to 120 a/c and settings about halfway for everything....between 14fps and 8 fps on approach but once I land back up to smooth 30 fps...frustrating..think I am going to give up on flightsim until microsoft fs2020 comes out....enough of this crapola....not enjoyable anymore and tired of spending thousands of dollars to put up with this.

Unlikely, but are you using more than 32GB of RAM?
Also, is your Windows paging file size / virtual memory set to 'system managed' and is there enough space left on the disk?


Whose AI are you using? Some developers' models are much better than others.
Have you turned completely AI off - what performance do you get then?


As alluded to by @PatrickZz, are you finding that you are getting a lot of scenery model and texture loading / pop-up while on the approach, leading to low FPS?
A well-regarded forumer elsewhere has made a few tweaks to the Prepar3d.cfg which I use:

[GRAPHICS]
ENABLE_MEMORY_OPTIMIZATION=0
MAX_TEXTURE_REQUEST_DISTANCE=320000.000000
[SCENERY]
SCENERY_DRAW_DISTANCE=64000.000000

SCENERY_DRAW_DISTANCE -- (New) this value changes with AG distance slider (medium and low) will be 32000 (meters or 32km), at max the value will be 64000 (64km) ... this value can be manually increased to a max of 128000 (128km), be warned there can be significant FPS hit if you go to 128000. Also be aware that if you do manual edits of this value and then go into P3D graphic settings and make "other" unrelated changes and hit OK, it would reset this value to whatever you AG distance slider is currently at.

MAX_TEXTURE_REQUEST_DISTANCE -- (New) there is no cap on this value, default is 1000 ... experiment, 320000 worked well for my 1080Ti but try high if you have the VRAM to spare

ENABLE_MEMORY_OPTIMIZATION -- (New) I would set this to zero unless you are short on VRAM

Pushing the settings out a bit further may seem counter-intuitive, but actually setting them a bit higher may help prevent everything being requested at the most demanding time, which is on approach.


Have you tried disabling all other add-on scenery entries (including Orbx) to leave just the default and one payware airport scenery? Do you have the same poor performance issues then?

If so, I wonder whether there are missing models / textures that P3D is hunting for in the background, but cannot call-up?
Therefore, it may be worth your while doing a full re-install of P3D (not just the client and content components).